Status Updates From Visionary Film: The America...

Chapter 1. Meshes of the Afternoon

ch2: Ritual and Nature. More Maya Deren with brief bits of Cocteau and Willard Maas. I think Derens work never matches her first "Meshes". "At Land" comes pretty close. The end deals with Deren's writings on film as art. Agree with her basic idea of cinema as an artistic medium (in the digital age it seems like: well duh, but she was writing of course in the 1940s and 50s.) but Ive issues w. her polemics on media.

I haven't finished ch 2. yet I got distracted looking up some of the films mentioned to no avail. (A couple of the titles mentioned in passing seem not to come up in google.) But this chapter seems to deal mostly with the rest of Maya Deren's body of work after "Meshes of the Afternoon" and also seems to discuss Jean Cocteau's "Sang d' un Poete" (Blood of a Poet) which I saw in an art history class once upon a time.

I wonder if Scott McCloud ever read this one. I'm constantly reminded of McCloud's explanations in Understanding Comics, while reading this book. Sitney uses much more obscure terminology than McCloud for the same ideas. I need a dictionary handy. I know these films so I find Sitney's need to write a blow by blow account of everything that happens in each one grates against the advice of every english teacher I had.